The Banker's Face

Social Cognition, 2011

Analogies between humans and animals based on facial resemblance have a long history. We report evidence for reverse anthropomorphism and the extension of facial stereotypes to lions, foxes, and dogs. In the stereotype extension, more positive traits were attributed to animals judged more attractive than con-specifics; more childlike traits were attributed to those judged more babyfaced. In the reverse anthropomorphism, human faces with more resemblance to lions, ascertained by connectionist modeling of facial metrics, were judged more dominant, cold, and shrewd, controlling attractiveness, babyfaceness, and sex. Faces with more resemblance to Labradors were judged warmer and less shrewd. Resemblance to foxes did not predict impressions. Results for lions and dogs were consistent with trait impressions of these animals and support the species overgeneralization hypothesis that evolutionarily adaptive reactions to particular animals are overgeneralized, with people perceived to have traits associated with animals their faces resemble. Other possible explanations are discussed. Comparisons of impressions of animals and humans has recently been a focus of psychological research, with a special issue of Social Cognition (April, 20081 devoted to anthropomorphism, the attribution of human traits to animals, and the converse dehumanization, the attribution of animal traits to humans. With the exception of the interesting finding that trait impressions of dogs, like those of humans, are influenced by appearance (Kwan, Gosling, & John, 2008), the role of appearance is not considered in this innovative body of research. Yet, the idea that humans share traits with the animals they resemble, the focus of the present research, has a long history. The Physiognomica, written in ancient Greece (often ascribed to Aristotle), includes colorful assumptions about people based on their resemblance to animals, For example, it argues that just as animals with coarse hair are brave-the lion, the wild boar, the wolf-so are people with coarse hair. People with smooth, silky hair, on the other hand, are timid as lambs (quoted in Lavater, 1783/1879, pp. 206-207). In the 16th century, Della Porta expressed the logic of animal analogies in syllogisms like: "All parrots are talkers, all men with such noses are like parrots, therefore all such men are talkers" (Della Porta, 1586). Le Brun, a 17thcentury French artist produced engravings comparing the facial form and character of

Lewis Carroll Review; The Reviewing Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society, 2019

The Lewis Carroll Review: The Reviewing Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society , 2021

University of Warwick - School of Modern Languages Research Seminar

The research I present today is aimed at providing evidence for the existence in literature of a stylistic phenomenon that I call "literary caricature". That is, a mode of representation of the human figure based on deformation, and conceivable as a verbal equivalent of visual caricature.

Thinking with animals: An exploration of the animal turn through art making and metaphor, 2017

INTERSTUDIA, 2017

The main objective of Ezequiel Ferriol’s article is to answer a question posed by the editor and commentator Martin Gardner: “Why in the world were they sharpening a spade?” (Gardner 2006: 44), in relation to what the crew of Lewis Carroll’s «The Hunting of the Snark» was doing for seeking that impossible creature: “the Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade”. By performing a philological analysis of any possible locus similis throughout Carroll’s works, the author studies all matches found in the light of semantics, semiotics, and transtextuality.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognomy in the nineteenth century and, after the trials of 1895, in depictions that link Wilde to a pathologically expressive personality type. Personality and modern vision converge in the subject of Wilde's face, and their relation is illuminated by recent debates about affects and the emotions as well as by the theories of visual modernity advanced by Charles Baudelaire, Max Beerbohm, and E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris . Whereas early caricatures of Wilde invest the image with a readable psychology or interior, later depictions maintain a fiction of readability linked to a purely physiological notion of abnormal personality.

Aesthetics and Neuroscience

The impact on beholders of anthropomorphic representations depicting facial expressions undoubtedly plays a prominent role in societies, given the special place granted to these images through space and time, and their cultural and social importance. Here, we investigate this impact in terms of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms behind the aesthetic experience. Given that face processing is universal among humans, this is necessarily a cross-cultural issue, and we therefore chose to tackle it from an interdisciplinary perspective, reviewing the artistic, ethnographic, anthropological and cognitive literature on figuration and facial expression processing. This review was informed by the results of an experimental pilot study. Our findings shed light on the relationship between the three dimensions of the aesthetic experience (attention, emotion, and aesthetic judgement), and show that figures share a common property that modulates the aesthetic impact. Keywords Figuration Á Aesthetic experience Á Empirical aesthetics Á Cross-cultural study Á Social agency Á Cognitive approach Anthropomorphic representations, especially facial expressions, have featured heavily in artwork throughout human history and civilization, in artefacts representing cultural, social or religious themes. Here, anthropomorphic refers to all figures that are human-like in their visual appearance. These representations are realistic or stylized figures or even items that make up a human figure when put together. It is our

2022

The modern myth of Pinocchio has been variously interpreted, yet clues from the poetics of its author, Carlo Collodi, seem to corroborate the hypothesis that its growing wooden nose is an emblem of the consubstantial human attitude to use the face as a device for simulation and dissimulation. The epistemic and emotional uncertainty of the face makes it an ideal object for semiotics, which must investigate the transition from the biological emergence of the face through natural evolution to the constitution of face cultures through language. Myths play an important role in shaping and representing this transition, from the ancient mythical origin of the portrait told by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, blindfolded to become a faceless victim and then replaced with a ram. They all seem to relate to the difficult dialectic between the affirmation of the human singularity in the figure of the face and its destitution in the contrast with transcendental forces, that of nature, that of other human hostile beings, or that of transcendence. Based on the philosophical interpretation of this dialectic from Lévinas on, the article pleads for the constitution of a new mythical rhetoric, in which humans finally learn not to thwart each other faciality, they preserve it from the encroachment of technology, and at the same time learn to grant it more and more to other living beings, starting from fellow animals.

International Journal of Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric (IJSVR), IGI Global, 2017

That 'the face is like a mirror (to the soul)' resonates cross-culturally and trans-historically throughoutthemediaimaginaryofthelastthreemillennia.Butbeyonditsgeneralhabitualtopos asanonto-cartographicblueprintineverydaylife,theauthorpresentsthiscatoptricmetaphor asaspecificepistemologicaltropewithintheadvertisingdesignsthattheauthordefinesasface studies.Prospectingrepresentativeusagesintheprintedartifactsfromscientificresearch,the authorprobestheprintadvertisementsforscientificcommunications,newspapercartoons,and periodicalspreads-theirintermedialandmultimodalgenealogies.Theauthorthenproblematizes themetaphoricsimilitudebetweenthefaceandamirrorasafixedlystabletype,withfluidly shiftingtokensacrossexplanatorymodelsandpedagogicalnormsforthemeaningoffacialsigns. Iproposenotonlythatscientificgatekeepersrhetoricallydiagrammatizesemanticterms/face/ and/mirror/-orotherspecularprostheses-inthebrandidentificationandmarketingnarrativesby whichtheycallfortheattentionofknowledgeconsumers,butalsohowthesecatoptricmetaphors ascognitivemechanismsinspireconceptualandmethodologicalinnovationintheveryscience aboutfaceitself.